RELAJSCHONS

PA BEGARAN (skoja!) min sista tenta i skolan:

It’s 6’oclock in the morning, Monday. Our bedroom is pitch black and he is leaning over me, I can smell toothpaste and after shave. My eyes aren’t open but I know what he is wearing; the black suit, dark purple tie. His leather laptop bag is sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, waiting for him to pick it up and sneak out of the room. My breathing is quiet and light, I put a finger under my nose and I can sense a distant smell of red wine from the night before. Everything would have been absolutely immaculate if it wasn’t for that smell. Then it’s too late, I’m awake, I can’t sleep any longer. I know what the house looks like: All the floors are vacuumed, the tiles in the bathroom have been scrubbed and washed, all surfaces have been cleaned with the strongest smelling bleach I could find, the whole house looks so pristine and perfect that I want to dip my feet in a tub of water and strong soap just before getting out of bed. To make it stay that way.

He is kissing me goodbye on the cheek now. I let out a satisfied “mmm...” and he strokes my hair and I know he is smiling. Then he is gone and I can hear the key in the lock and the taxi is waiting and suddenly everything is so quiet, so quiet.
I open the fridge. Light yoghurts, eggs, cream cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, limes, diet coke, milk and orange juice. I make myself a cup of coffee, strong and black. No sugar. I’m in my morning bathrobe; it feels clean and silky on my skin. I open the terrace door and step out into the sunshine. The porch is nice and wide. Our gardener has planted flowers everywhere. The wooden floors have been scrubbed and washed. We recently bought the garden furniture, tubular metal table and chairs. I picked them myself from one of the many glossy catalogues on our coffee table.
I think about how much I love him. I often think about this. What would I do, who would I be without him. Money may not be everything, but for me it solved so much. I had never had something obvious I wanted to do, so if it wasn’t for him I would have ended up in a boring, average paid job. It wasn’t necessarily anything wrong with that. But to me, it seemed terrifying.

“Never become dependent on anyone, especially not a man”, my friends would tell me. They would fool around with themselves, explore their sexuality, and take a lot of pride in being aware of the patriarchy. How ugly they thought my choice was. And it was my choice. Yet they refused to accept that, they hated me for it. How could I be satisfied in a life like this? They couldn’t grasp it. I was oppressed! I was trying to tell them, I was just as oppressed as I felt, i.e. not at all. “Us women, we have got to stick together!” We had to fight.

But the fight wasn’t in me, I felt blank and tired and their life scared me. All that hunger. They all seemed to live their life by the rule “One can never be independent enough.”

I almost dozed off sitting on the terrace in the light breeze and sunshine. But then the phone rang. I jumped in my seat, felt a stroke of panic. Ringing phones always did that to me. Who is it? What do they want? I got up and rushed inside, suddenly eager to answer and get it out of the way.
“Hello?”
“Hi! It’s me, Sarah. What are you doing?”
“Oh, Hi! Is it you. Sorry, I was.... studying. Preparing my cooking, we each have to cook something on our own and present to the whole class by the end of this week. It’s challenging, it will be...”
“Great. So you’re keeping busy then, that’s so good. Is John at the office?”
“Yeah... Well, he’s gone to Hong Kong actually.”
“Hong Kong! For how long?”
“Two weeks, no longer. He will be back in fourteen days; they are closing a business deal over there, singing contracts, all that. I am not sure on the details...”
“I see... Well, I’ve just dropped the kids at the nursery and I’m on my way to work now. You know I’m off on Thursdays and Fridays, why don’t you come over? “
“Sure. We’ll have to sort something... I will call you back.”
“Please do. You know you are always welcome around if you get lonely...”
“I’m fine; I have to go, OK?”

As we hung up I was almost shivering from anger. Why did she always use that pity tone with me? What was her problem? She’s one of my oldest friends, fine. We used to party together, been through different stages of life together. She met her husband a couple of years ago, they have two kids together now and they’ve recently renovated a lovely house in the countryside. He’s a self employed carpenter and she’s working in PR at the University. She thinks she’s so much better than me. I never got myself a proper education; it wasn’t high on my list. I didn’t want to sacrifice my body to get pregnant, and besides John is travelling all the time, so what would be the point? I couldn’t count the amount of phone conversations just like that one. Then there was Angie or Cara calling, all treating me quite the same.
I know John is doing some stuff that isn’t legal. Truth be told, I love that. He tells me it’s nothing evil, nothing massively wrong like he is hurting anyone or stealing from the poor. He won’t tell me exactly and I am not asking. This is what attracts me. I am his lonesome wife, looking after the house, being forever faithful. I can see it all clear, I am not living in denial. I know exactly what I am like, what he is like, how and why we live our life like this. Because we can. I am not with him for his money. He is handsome, he is funny and clever. I do really love him. I get tired of having to justify that. Why can’t I love him and the money?

It’s 5 o’clock in the afternoon now and I’ve dressed myself. I am wearing a black satin skirt and white transparent top. I’ve opened a bottle of wine that I brought up from the wine cellar. I don’t know anything about wine, but John does. I can have anything I want, naturally, and the one I picked really is as dusty as you’d think it would be. I put on some music. Neither do I like music, but John has a great collection of LP’s. It’s almost cliché the way he has these sophisticated interests as well as being a crafty businessman.

I am trying to decide what to cook. John can’t cook and so I signed up for a cooking class. I failed to turn up last time, but I think I am making some progress now. I read the recipe carefully, doing everything in order to avoid getting stressed by all the text.

“Duck and ginger salad with truffle oil”

I decide to try this. Every Monday I send in a list of 7 recipes to a local butcher, supermarket and green grocer. They read it through and send back all their finest ingredients for me to make the meals. I am not always cooking 7 days a week but I like having the service just in case.
Dusty Springfield is singing “I wanna make you happy” and I pour a second glass of wine. The house is quiet, so quiet. I walk in silence to the bathroom, still sipping the wine, and I look at myself in the full length mirror. My skin is white. Almost pale. I spend all day in the sun at the terrace, and yet it looks pale. My lips are big and sore, the wine making it look as if I am wearing dark lipstick. I am skinny but my breasts look big and firm. My hair is dark brown, coloured, and not exactly in a good shape. I haven’t had time to anything about that.
I haven’t had time.

I dream of having lots of friends, true and genuine friends. As it is now, I feel like the ones I have are only there to observe me. If I drink, I drink too much. If I don’t drink, I don’t know how to enjoy myself. If I eat, I eat too much or at least the wrong food. If I don’t eat, I have suddenly got an eating disorder.
What I hated the most, what almost made me furious, was that nagging feeling that they might be right. Was I happy? Was I as happy as I could be? Did I live life to its full? Maybe I thought I was happy because I had been able to collect all the classical attributes that should give happiness.
When John is home, when he’s been home for quite some time and when work is going well and he’s not stressed or pre-occupied, we have lots of parties here. Mostly his
colleagues and their wives, but they are proper parties. We hire catering firms. We heat the pool in the garden. We drink till we pass out.

It was at one of these parties that I met Lo – short for Lorraine. Her husband Adam worked for John, they had recently been in San Francisco together and it was the end of something big. This particular night they came over to ours to celebrate it and blow off some steam (it’s funny looking back – I don’t even know what we were celebrating) Lo was gorgeous. She was half Japanese and had long black wavy hair. She moved with a grace I had never seen before. I found her fascinating. As soon as they arrived Lo gave me lots of attention. We sat together on the terrace; eating slow cooked lamb, cooked in some of the wine from our cellar. She told me about her life, her upbringing and her travels, and how she longed for kids but thought it was such a big decision that she’d probably never actually get pregnant. She was different from the other wives – she didn’t talk about her husband Adam. Usually I sat by the pool with the other wives as soon as we had finished dessert – they spoke about their husbands latest trips and how confusing it was with their businesses. And many of them had kids, oh how they talked about kids! Exchanging stories and advice, it was never-ending. But Lo didn’t even mention Adam. They sat far away from each other at the dining table, and Adam was engaged in a conversation with a man in a black suit I hadn’t seen before. I glanced over at John and he looked at me with a smile and a wink. I almost blushed, as if it was our first date. He would never stop being handsome to me. He still made my heart skip a beat. What I realised then was that Adam wasn’t talking about Lo either. I couldn’t hear him from where I was sitting, but he was most certainly not talking about her. I had stopped talking about John with my friends too. In fact, I tried mentioning him as little as I possibly could. But what did I talk about instead? I couldn’t recall one single thing that I spoke about with such excitement as Lo did about hundreds of different subjects.

“She managed to keep herself, she didn’t go down with love, and it didn’t completely fill her up in such a self -consuming way as it did with me.” I thought to myself that night.

What it all came down to was that I wasn’t unhappy – but other people had decided I was. I looked around our tastefully decorated old fashioned house and it filled me with satisfaction. All the catalogues I could flick through and choose what I wanted from. To live this shallow life made me happy. Yes, I was bored quite a lot. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, what kind of job I could enjoy – but wasn’t all that a small price to pay? I never had to be seriously worried about... well, anything!

The night has arrived now. I’ve eaten my duck salad in silence with a lit candle and opened another bottle of wine. The stormy wind is howling through the trees and it’s dark. I turned the TV on, then back off again. Twice I did this, just to be met by loud adverts and stupid family game shows. I disconnected the telephone, which made me feel strangely liberated. I don’t know exactly why I did that. Anyone could reach me on the mobile phone if they wanted to. But somehow I felt safe, not having to jump to a ringing landline. I’m sitting on the sofa, just sitting. My head is spinning and I know I’ve had too much to drink. But is there anyone here to notice? I am smiling, I feel so damn happy. All emotions are embracing me at once and I feel like getting undressed and dancing naked in our living room. I laugh at the thought of this and suddenly my eyes are getting heavy. I put down the wine glass on a coaster and I lay down on the floor. My breathing is slow and controlled. I focus on that and the last thing I remember is wishing John would put the key in the door. He would stand there in the dark hallway with his briefcase and I would wonder how it’s possible that he can look so good and how his after shave can still smell so nice even after all these long plane rides.

“Please come home”, I think as I close my eyes and pass out on the living room floor.